Biomedical subjects

Lisa A Neff

Publications and source records attributed to Lisa A Neff.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Gender differences in social support: a question of skill or responsiveness?

Spouses often report that wives provide better social support than husbands. Yet studies observing spouses' supportive interactions challenge this perception, finding no differences between husbands' and wives' supportive behaviors. This article offers reconciliation by suggesting that husbands and wives may differ, not in their skill at providing support, but in their responsiveness to their partners' changing needs over time. Observational and diary data from couples confirmed that, whereas husbands and wives did not differ on average in the support they provided each other, they did differ in the timing of that support. Wives tended to provide better support on days that their husbands experienced greater stress. However, when wives experienced greater stress, their husbands displayed both support and negativity.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2005

To know you is to love you: the implications of global adoration and specific accuracy for marital relationships.

Despite the strong positive feelings that characterize newlyweds, many marriages end in disappointment. To understand this shift, the authors argue that although newlyweds' global relationship evaluations may be uniformly positive, not all spouses base their global adoration on an accurate perception of their partner's specific qualities. Two longitudinal studies confirmed that whereas most newlyweds enhanced their partners at the level of their global perceptions, spouses varied significantly in their perceptions of their partners' specific qualities. For wives, but not for husbands, more accurate specific perceptions were associated with their supportive behaviors, feelings of control in the marriage, and whether or not the marriage ended in divorce. Thus, love grounded in specific accuracy appears to be stronger than love absent accuracy.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

How does context affect intimate relationships? linking external stress and cognitive processes within marriage.

Stressors external to the marriage frequently affect the way spouses evaluate their marital quality. To date, however, understanding of the interplay between external stress and internal relationship processes has been limited in two ways. First, research has generally examined only the short-term consequences of stress. Second, the mechanisms through which external stressors influence relationship outcomes are unclear. This study addressed both limitations by examining relationship cognitions that may mediate the effects of external stress throughout 4 years of marriage. Analyses confirmed that stressful experiences were associated with the trajectory of marital quality overtime. Furthermore, both the content and the organization of spouses' specific relationship cognitions mediated this effect. That is, stress negatively influenced the nature of spouses' marital perceptions as well as the way spouses interpreted and processed those perceptions. These findings draw attention to ways that the context of relationships shapes and constrains relationship processes.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

The dynamic structure of relationship perceptions: differential importance as a strategy of relationship maintenance.

How do couples maintain relationship satisfaction despite specific negative perceptions of their relationships? One way to minimize the global implications of negative perceptions is to attribute differential importance to positive and negative features of the relationship. As those features change over time, satisfied intimates may alter their perceived importance, ensuring that positive features are always more closely associated with global satisfaction than negative ones. The current study examined the specific perceptions of 82 newly married couples at five assessments across their first 3 years of marriage. A tendency to view positive perceptions as more important than negative perceptions was associated with higher marital satisfaction. Moreover, a tendency to alter the importance of specific perceptions as those perceptions changed over time was associated with more stable global satisfaction. These findings highlight the interplay between the content and the structure of intimates' perceptions in determining relationship outcomes.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Judgments of a relationship partner: specific accuracy but global enhancement.

How do partners in satisfying close relationships perceive each other? Some argue that relationships benefit from each partner having an accurate view of the other, while others maintain that partners benefit when they perceive each other in the most positive light possible. The current paper proposes that each of these benefits operates at a separate level of abstraction. Specifically, we propose that satisfied partners tend to be accurate in their specific perceptions of each other, but enhancing in their global evaluations. To address hypotheses derived from this model, global and specific perceptions of self and partner were obtained from a sample of 82 newlywed couples. Results indicate that: 1) trait perceptions assessed by different commonly used measures differ significantly in their breadth; 2) broader or more global traits are rated as significantly more desirable and important; 3) spouses in satisfying marriages describe their partners' positive traits in more global terms and their negative traits in more specific terms; and 4) spouses perceive each other more accurately on specific traits than global traits.

Adult↗